Friday, December 19, 2014

President Obama's core

Jon Favreau, Obama's former speechwriter, tweeted this during the President's news conference today.

This last part of this last answer is why the President ran for office.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) December 19, 2014

I think Jon understands President Obama better than anyone outside his close circle of family and friends. So let's take a look at why he thinks Barack Obama ran for office. Here are the last few paragraphs of the President's remarks today.

The one thing I will say -- and this is going to be the last thing I say -- is that one of the great things about this job is you get to know the American people. I mean, you meet folks from every walk of life and every region of the country, and every race and every faith. And what I don’t think is always captured in our political debates is the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing, and people are basically good and have good intentions. Sometimes our institutions and our systems don’t work as well as they should. Sometimes you've got a police department that has gotten into bad habits over a period of time and hasn’t maybe surfaced some hidden biases that we all carry around. But if you offer practical solutions, I think people want to fix these problems. It’s not -- this isn’t a situation where people feel good seeing somebody choked and dying. I think that troubles everybody. So there’s an opportunity of all of us to come together and to take a practical approach to these problems.

And I guess that's my general theme for the end of the year -- which is we’ve gone through difficult times. It is your job, press corps, to report on all the mistakes that are made and all the bad things that happen and the crises that look like they're popping. And I understand that. But through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better. The economy has gotten better. Our ability to generate clean energy has gotten better. We know more about how to educate our kids. We solved problems. Ebola is a real crisis; you get a mistake in the first case because it’s not something that's been seen before -- we fix it. You have some unaccompanied children who spike at a border, and it may not get fixed in the time frame of the news cycle, but it gets fixed.

And part of what I hope as we reflect on the New Year this should generate is some confidence. America knows how to solve problems. And when we work together, we can't be stopped.

I keep going back to this over and over, but Ta-Nehisi Coates called it a "shocking, almost certifiable faith in humanity." Whether or not you think that faith is warranted, it is what sits at the core of who President Barack Obama is.